Monday, October 10, 2011

Human Centipede 2 (I missed the original, but the sequel sounds better..) One of those reviews that David hates because it makes fun of the movie and its director. But still..... The premise reminds me of Don Quixote, that beginning point of all fiction, in that everybody in Human Centipede 2, just like everybody in part 2 of Don Quixote, has seen the original. Daniel Engberg writes engagingly:

Once you've made a feature film about a lunatic who kidnaps innocent people and then sews together their throats and rectums, how do you raise the stakes? I'll say this for Human Centipede 2: Tom Six has done the impossible. He's created a sequel that's several orders of magnitude more vile, more nihilistic, and more repellant than the original. And he didn't even need to change the premise.

The genius of HC2—you heard me, the genius—lies in the way in which it repurposes the original. Once again, we're following the exploits of a lunatic kidnapper with a fetish for artificially induced digestive continuity. This time, it's a simple-minded parking attendant named Martin who's obsessed with Human Centipede in a film-within-a-film kind of way. He watches it on his laptop, again and again, and takes copious notes for a re-enactment.

4 comments:

"The mute, homuncular, pop-eyed, simpleminded, morbidly obese Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) dreams not only of duplicating the ghastly experiment of that film’s Dr. Heiter but quadrupling the number of subjects. Instead of surgically joining three people from mouth to anus (teeth knocked out, knee ligaments severed, digestive tubes fused so that feces travel through each patient in turn), he will connect a dozen—one an actress from First Sequence, lured to London on the pretense of auditioning for Quentin Tarantino, the others more or less random, chosen from his perch before a bank of parking-garage surveillance cameras. Unlike Heiter, Martin has no medical training and instead of sterile instruments uses crowbars, scissors, and rusty knives. He smiles and waves his arms like a conductor as twelve mutilated human beings howl, bleed, lavishly soil one another and themselves, and expire."